Merkle is one of the world’s largest digital marketing firms, recognized by analysts and industry experts as a leader in performance and loyalty marketing services, CRM, addressable and database marketing technology, and related services and solutions. Each year, their Marketing Imperatives report – a widely-read resource for customer-focused marketing leaders – spells out the company’s latest thinking around their core pursuit: placing people at the heart of the business strategy.
Merkle’s goal is to stimulate thinking toward the future of marketing while providing actionable ideas that can impact business in the short term.
Each annual installment of the award-winning Marketing Imperatives is designed not to replace, but to build upon the previous one and, ultimately, to strengthen an ongoing approach to people-based marketing. This latest, eighth edition expands upon 2019’s Imperatives on the alignment of the customer strategy, the implementation of the technology stack, and execution of the customer-based strategy in the market.
The 2020 Marketing Imperatives
Titled “Hyper-Personalization and the Connected Customer Experience,” the 2020 Imperatives detail how brand success will ultimately hinge upon achieving the next level of addressable, personalized marketing and playing a leading role in the direct-to-consumer revolution.
This year’s Imperatives were developed to help marketing and experience leaders attack this new reality, using data, analytics, and technology to drive the total customer experience with greater relevance and impact. Below is an overview of the three main areas of focus for this 2020 report.
Deliver the Total Customer Experience
Marketing now is responsible for growth and must stretch its purview to include ownership of the overall customer experience. Marketers must better understand customers, anticipate their needs, and use ever more engaging levels of personalization to connect with them across any touchpoint in the customer journey.
The reality is that the majority of marketing spend is concentrated in the “find and win” stages of that journey, but the real customer value is generated when those customers are kept active and grow over time. Lifetime value is where the ROI from marketing spend really kicks in. And that value is far more likely to grow if you focus on meeting the connected needs of your customers at every stage of their journey and in whatever area they are interacting with you (a refund, shopping for something new, an inquiry, a change of circumstance, a complaint, etc.).
The marketer has the data necessary to inform better exchanges in each of those areas but currently is not motivated to provide the relevant data to the sales, servicing, and product development efforts that will affect the customer experience in a new way. As we start to think differently about marketing and customer data, we need to be developing ways to incentivize data sharing at an individual level that can improve the overall customer experience across the entire relationship with the enterprise.
With the ever-evolving regulations about how companies can use consumer data, marketers need to be asking for more from customers, using new approaches that drive value to both sides. Customers want better experiences and are willing to exchange data to get them. What they don’t want is someone constantly asking for things that don’t seem to matter. You as a marketer need to decide which information is critical to both of those value points.
Take Ownership of Identity
Customer centricity has long been a core tenet of the marketing function at many companies. But magnitude of transformation requires a level of hyper-personalization that surpasses anything we’ve seen in the past. It means that a brand’s relationship with a customer is only as good as a company’s ability to know who it is really talking to at every touchpoint.
At the same time, unprecedented changes are taking place around US privacy regulations, beginning with the 2020 rollout of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA). Due to the influence of consumer privacy concerns, big marketing tech players like Google, Apple, and Facebook are deprecating third-party cookie-based tracking and data use for targeting. Marketers are witnessing the collapse of the open third-party cookie as the longstanding currency of the digital marketing and media ecosystem.
Instead, companies and many others are developing identity using PII-based identifiers from subscriptions, service, and content consumption as one ID at a personal level. Their hyper-personalized approach to customer engagement is winning the battle for the person ID among cross-screen content, commerce, targeting, and measurement.
Marketers today have an opportunity to take ownership of identity at the person level and make this a key advantage over competitors. To do this, they must build their own “private identity graphs,” versus relying on walled-garden players like Google and Facebook or the quickly fading third-party cookie-based events across the open web. Identity is not only the linchpin of marketing but at the heart of how businesses must operate.
Enable Agility Through Strategic Sourcing
Realizing the vision of hyper-personalization and the total customer experience will require not only robust supporting data and technology, but also a thoughtful reconsideration of a company’s current marketing operations to realign people, skills, and processes.
Today’s initiatives are being driven by more than just cost, but also strategic priorities such as agility for greater speed and flexibility in execution; transparency for better attribution and accountability in ROMI; and innovation for new processes and offerings that drive differentiation.
Companies with a strong resourcing strategy optimize their marketing organization around these priorities. This is not an either/or decision about bringing everything in-house or relying exclusively on external partners. There is a continuum of possible combinations across in-house FTEs, in-housing partners like Filter, outside agencies, and offshore resources. Ultimately, the optimal team structure will be one that’s unique to each company – and getting it right builds an advantage that will be difficult to replicate.
Putting Imperatives into Action
Merkle’s 2020 report provides further insights, strategic frameworks, and tactical guidelines for putting each of these Imperatives into action. It also describes how this considerable work can be achieved in an incremental and scalable way – how each Imperative doesn’t have to be a big, complex, cross-business plan, but rather starts best using what you have, rather than waiting for new capabilities. It is faster, easier, and more closely aligned to an agile way of working.
“Our goal is to be smarter, more efficient, and more targeted with every customer interaction, from introduction to win-back and every stage in between. And the 2020 Marketing Imperatives serve as an invaluable guide to achieving the next level of hyper-personalization to deliver that total customer experience.”
Kimberley Gardiner
CMO, Mitsubishi Motors NA
Lastly, key themes of the 2020 Marketing Imperatives also relate directly to Filter’s Hybrid Services Model, and to the unique benefits in-housing partners like Filter bring to CMOs and their marketing operations. Over the next several weeks we’ll explore these connections in new posts to this blog.
